In Britain’s Parliament, a Crowded House Bursting With Lords

A parliamentary session this month at the House of Lords in London. There is no limit on membership, and members generally serve for life.Credit
Pool photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth

How many lords are enough?

“The 12 Days of Christmas” traditionally gets by with just 10 lords a-leaping. But the House of Lords, the essentially consultative second chamber of the British Parliament, now has 810.

That’s twice as many lords as can fit in their elegant hall in Westminster, with its red leather benches. And, perhaps uniquely, the lords even outnumber their counterparts in the House of Commons, which is now fixed at 650 members and soon will have just 600. There is no limit on the House of Lords, whose members generally serve for life.

Twenty-six of the lords are bishops (England has a state religion, after all), and 91 are peers with hereditary noble titles. The vast majority are life peers, with seats and titles they cannot pass to descendants.

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There’s the rub, and a source of increasing popular contempt for the lords. Some life peers have been honored for noble acts and charitable works, but many were elevated for banal political reasons: for making money or donating it, often to the governing party (known as cash for honors), or simply for serving in government a long time.

But more noisy still is the furor that arises whenever a prime minister leaves office, with a “resignation honors list” that rewards all kinds of people. When David Cameron suddenly resigned after the June 23 referendum on British membership in the European Union, he produced a list that a friend and former aide, Steve Hilton, called a “serious type of very British corruption.” There were honors for donors, aides, drivers, hairstylists, and even the person who managed the schedule and wardrobe for his wife, Samantha.

Mr. Hilton called it “a symptom of our corrupt and decaying democracy,” and urged Britons to “use this moment to bring about a radical reform of the whole rotten system.” Nothing has changed, of course.

But there is one consolation for current peers. Most of the newly honored just get “gongs” — medals and honorifics like the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, the M.B.E. — rather than peerages that would entitle them, too, to try to find a place to sit in the crowded House of Lords.

Correction: October 14, 2016

The What in the World article in some editions on Sept. 17 about the runaway expansion of Britain’s House of Lords misidentified the political entity that has a state religion, represented in the House of Lords by 26 Anglican bishops. It is England, not Britain.

A version of this article appears in print on September 17, 2016, on Page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: In Britain, A House Overloaded With Lords. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe